


angels of the silences.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, Episode: s09e03 I'm No Angel, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-25
Updated: 2013-10-25
Packaged: 2017-12-30 06:34:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1015334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean waits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	angels of the silences.

 

  _did you come? would you lie?_  
 _why'd you leave me 'till I'm only good for waiting for you?_  
 _all my sins, I said that I would pay for them_  
 _if I could come back to you_

_\---_

_"Faith is a weird thing, it in a sense it is all about waiting.  It's not actually about getting anything, you know.  Faith is about the wait because once you get something there is no need anymore and so a lot about faith is just the willingness to sort of throw yourself on a fence and hang there for a while."_

 

Dean wakes up and the plaster is cracking off the ceiling of his room, he opens his eyes and see flakes of white like down on his bedspread and he think of feathers.  For weeks afterward he wakes up with angry red marks breaking the skin on his chest, his throat.  He bleeds.  He ruins his sheets, his pillows.  He claws at his neck while he sleeps.  

He wakes up and turns over and no one's there.  He puts his face down on his pillow and breathes very slowly.  He's listening for footfalls in the hall or doors opening, shutting.  He's going to get up soon.  He'll make breakfast first, before anything else.  He'll cook bacon and eggs and put some cash in a plastic baggie and fill a duffel bag with books from the library and knives from the walls of his room.  He'll take Cas shopping, help him find his way around a mall.  He'll buy Cas some shirts, some socks and jeans and an electric razor.  He'll wait in the car with Cas no matter how long it'll be before his bus loads and he'll say nice things.  He'll remind Cas that this isn't for long.  That he'll be there in a heartbeat the moment Cas needs him, needs anything.  That Cas is family.  He'll punch his number into Cas's new cellphone and write it down on a scrap of paper and stick it in his pocket, just in case.  

He'll walk with Cas up to the bus and he'll hug Cas hard, even if Cas won't look him in the eye or touch him back.  He'll watch Cas step on board, just to make sure he gets on okay.  He'll send Cas a text message before the bus had even pulled out of the station, and it'll say _Be careful buddy._  Or maybe it'll say _I'm so goddamned sorry, please don't hate me, please understand._ Or maybe it'll say, _Can I call you sometime? Just to talk?_

Dean rolls over and gets out of bed.  The halls are quiet.  The doors are shut.  He's already gone.

 

\---

Dean drives home and Cas sleeps in the backseat.  He doesn't take up much space.  He doesn't stretch out on the bench seat.  He doesn't lean his head against the window.  He lets his chin drop down on his chest and draws in quick, shallow breaths.  Dean counts the seconds until he releases them.  He glances at Cas in the rearview mirror and he thinks for the first time, He is coming home.  He is coming home with me _._  He can't stop smiling.  

It’s the stupidest thing.  From the moment Dean knew Cas was still on earth, was alive, was human, he's been thinking of the stupidest things and he never knows why.  He keeps thinking of soft cotton sheets and cooking breakfast and toothpaste in the sink.  He keeps thinking of things like what stupid phrase Cas might want to use as an email address and working up a driver's license and taking photo after photo of Cas because he can't stop smiling at Dean whenever he holds up the camera and demands that Cas say cheese.  He keeps thinking about taking Cas out to eat, some night when they're holed up in some town.  Telling Cas to pick whatever he wants off the dessert menu and waiting to see what he'll choose.  Setting up one of those spare rooms, giving Cas his own towels and washclothes and pillowcases and quilts.

When they get home tonight, he is planning to take Cas into his room and sit him down and give him a talk.  To kiss him. To tell Cas that sometimes he thinks that maybe he loves him a little.  He feels full of fear and hope and other stupid shit like that and he's going to do it anyway.

He flips on the headlights and imagines putting his hands on Cas's face again, just holding him like that for a while.  He's going to say,  _I've been waiting to do this forever._ He's going to say,  _I've been so worried_.  He's going to say,  _I love you, did you know that? did you know that before you died?  
_

   ---

He lets Dean kiss him.  He lets Dean whisper, _I'm sorry, I'm so sorry_ across his skin.  He lets Dean pull him down on the bed and put hands on his face. He lets Dean put lips to his forehead and arms around his shoulders.  

"Dean," he says. He's sitting so still. He doesn't move, not even when Dean presses kisses on his head and his cheek and his mouth. "I don't understand. I don't want to go."

Dean touches his ribs, one two three four.  He touches the bones under the letters marking Cas's skin and he flinches, pulling away, pulling out of Dean’s hands.  “They'll find you anyway,” Dean says.  He’s off the grid, Cas protests.   Yeah, okay, Dean says to that, and wonders how long he’ll have to stay in the dark this time.  He wonders if postcards will start showing up at their postbox with only the words  _Hello, Dean_  printed in neat, careful letters on the backs, with creases and slightly ragged corners.

Cas puts his mouth close to Dean's ear afterwards, murmuring _Dean, Dean_ , but Dean just rolls over.  "Dean," Cas is saying.  "Dean.  Please.  I don't have anywhere else to go."

"We'll work something out." He closes his eyes and tries to sleep.  "I thought," Cas is saying very quietly, "I thought you wanted me here."

He just says, "Yeah, you know I do."

"Dean," Cas says again.  He's reaching for Dean's hand.  "Please.  I don't know what to do.  Don't make me go. I want to stay."

 

 ---

“You can't stay,” Dean tells him, every time Cas shows up at the bunker, panting and ragged and glancing behind him at the door, like he can somehow see the angels approaching out of the corner of his eye.  "You're not safe here."  It’s a lie, probably. Cas puts his bags away in the room that he sometimes spends a night or two in.  Cas is just as safe here in the bunker as he is anywhere else, really.  Dean drags him back to his room anyway, every time.

He wonders if Cas misses him when he’s gone.  He wonders if that’s why Cas keeps coming back.  

Cas shows up that night, dripping wet.  Dean takes him by the arm and drags him off to his room and straight into bed.  Never mind that the sheets stay damp the rest of the night. Never mind that he gets rain everywhere, in his eyelashes, on the skin between his fingers, in the crease of his thighs.  it scares him, how easily it happens.

Cas looks at him, and there's rain in his eyelashes, too, and he's saying, “You’re not happy to see me.”

"I'm always happy to see you," Dean tells him, bewildered.  He puts his hands on Cas's shoulders, on his chest.  He touches the rain in Cas's hair.  "But you know you can't stay here."

Cas says, "I know," and he's still looking at Dean and he still looks so confused and Dean rolls over and stares at the wall.  He closes his eyes and takes long deep breaths.  He pretends to be asleep.  He pretends he doesn't hear Cas whispering _I don't know what I've done.  I don't know why you don't want me here.  Don't you like me anymore?_

He thinks, once, I could get used to this. It wouldn’t take long, either. Just two days of waking up to Cas’s morning breath and tripping over his boots on the way to the bathroom.  Just two days, and he could start to picture a thousand more days just like it, and the thought of an endless horizon of days makes him catch his breath.  Cas asleep at his side, drool all over his pillow; Cas ignoring the alarm on his cellphone, somehow sleeping through the snooze button but waking up the second Dean reaches out and runs a hand down his side.

In the morning, he yells at Cas for something stupid, and Cas goes stiff and hunched and leaves, slamming the door behind him and Dean watches him go with a certain satisfaction. He likes the worst moments between them. He can’t really explain why.  Maybe because they feel real, in a way that nothing else ever does between them.  Not like those moments when he’s lying next to Cas on their bed, when everything feels like it's too much and not enough and just what he’s always wanted and nothing like it at all.  This, Dean knows.  Dean can get behind slammed doors and shouting matches and Cas leaving and curling alone on his bed in a quiet desperate sadness.  Nothing else feels quite as normal as this.

He can't keep Cas, he tells himself.  He’s only borrowing him. 

He talks a lot of bullshit.  Mostly to Sam, because Sam will hear him out even when he knows Dean’s talking nonsense.  Sam listens to his spiel about bright lights and things getting better and all that he has to live for, if only he can hold out long enough.  If only he can wait, just a little while longer.  Good things can happen, Dean tells him.  Just you wait.

 

\---

Cas is sleeping and Dean is thinking that soon he'll have to shake him awake, tell him to leave, but in this moment he's pretending he doesn't have to.  That he can let Cas sleep in peace, keep hogging the covers, keep inching closer to having completely stolen the pillow.  That he can let Cas sleep in late while he gets up and starts breakfast.  

He thinks about Cas, wearing his robe, Cas, stealing his toothbrush, Cas, using the last of the shampoo and dripping all over the floors from their bed to the locker room.  He thinks about Cas slouching on the couch, dogearing Sam's books, Cas getting up to go on a grocery run with Dean, and it makes him wonder if this feeling isn’t true love after all, wanting to keep Cas that way.  

Dean's thought for so long that there was nothing he could do to keep Cas here, keep him happy, keep him wanting to stick around.  Nothing special he had to offer.  But maybe Cas is easy to please.  Maybe Dean's just never realized how easy it is make him smile; maybe that’s why he’s never really tried. But maybe it's not all that hard to make the corner of his mouth turn up in one of those almost-but-not-quite smiles, settling down a cup of coffee on the table by his elbow, or coming up beside him and hugging him around the shoulders. Maybe he'd give Dean that same look, if he brought home some stupid coffee mug decorated with Hallmark hearts and halos; maybe he'd smile that same way over a calendar with kittens pinned on the door of his room.  Maybe all it would take to keep Cas around is just a little more effort.  Look at him when he's talking.  Let him watch those cartoons all afternoon.  Let him rattle on about every little thought that goes through his mind.

One day, Dean thinks.  Just one day, just like that.  That's what he's been waiting for, all this time.  To have a day just like that.  He's been waiting for Cas, and even though he can't pinpoint the moment when he first started waiting for Cas, he knows that waiting is what he's been doing all along. Waiting for Cas to stop moving.  Waiting for Cas to decide he wants to be here, with Dean. Waiting for a moment, any moment, the right moment to tell Cas I love you, please stay.  He has been holding his breath as he goes through the motions of living, always waiting for the day when Cas will be there and his life will begin.

Dean wakes up alone.  It sort of surprises him, even though it really shouldn’t.  Cas has never stayed before.  He doesn’t stay now.  Too dangerous, Dean keeps saying, but he knows better.  He lies awake in the half-darkness just before dawn and remembers that there was a time when all he could think about was how to keep Cas here.  What it would take.  What he would have to do to keep Cas from leaving again.  Lock the doors, carve into his arm with a knife, paint sigils with his own blood to trap him inside these walls. 

He thinks, I would hold him.  All night, if I had to.  I would stay there, just like that, if he needed me.  If that’s what it takes to keep him here. I’d cook him breakfast.  I’d drive him to the mall.  I'd buy him a damn cat.

 

  ---

He’s been noticing a few things about time.  It’s stupid, for starters.  Time slows down during the bad shit and it speeds up through what might almost pass for good shit, only it leaves him so breathless he can never tell.  Every chance encounter with Cas is the same: over too fast, and leaving him with his head spinning.  Maybe with the beginnings of a headache, too, one that starts behind his eyes and ends up as a tight squeeze around his chest.

Like tonight.  He wakes up and doesn’t know why.  He feels like it ought to have been only a few minutes since he passed out on his bed, but he glances at his cell phone and it’s been hours.  He hears shallow breathing and it nearly scares him to death, makes him reach for the weapons on the mantel over his bed, but when he drops down to the floor he sees it’s only Cas.  How Cas had snuck inside his room, Dean may never know.  It’s not like he could just pop in and out anymore.  Cas uses doors these days.  And even that thought is a waste of time, because it’s four fifty-six in the morning and it’s only an hour or two before he needs to get up and he’s wasting time that he could be spending closer to Cas.  

Cas is sitting on the floor of Dean’s room, leaning back against Dean’s bed.  Dean can see his dark hair rising slightly over the edge of the bed.  He’s got his head thrown back against the edge of the mattress and his feet propped up against the wall and Dean wants to grab him by the arms and tug him into bed.

But-okay, Cas is asleep, and Dean’s desperate to rescue any stray moments he can find, and this is one he wants to keep.  This feels like something he's been waiting for, for a long, long time.  So he slides down off his bed and sits on the floor next to Cas, inching closer until their arms and knees touch, and when he slips his arm around Cas’s shoulders, Cas just goes with it.  He sags against Dean’s chest and tilts into Dean’s shoulders and Dean has no fucking idea why he’s sitting on the floor with a sleeping ex-angel with his head halfway to Dean’s lap, no fucking idea why it feels like an eternity that takes only a few heartbeats to pass.  

“Okay,” Dean says to the back of his head, and Cas just snores a little.  His hair brushes up against Dean’s mouth.  He drags a hand up and touches the ends of Cas’s hair for a little while, right there on the back of his neck where Cas usually can’t stand being touched. “Okay,” he says again.  He thinks about maybe buying Cas flowers.  He’s thought about it before.  He thinks about going out and finding a flower shop and coming back to the bunker with a potted plant or a bouquet of something with long stems and petals like velvet and leaving it in Cas’s room, and it would be waiting for Cas the next time he staggers home.  

That’s the way Dean wants to do it, but he can never tell when Cas might show up next, and picking up flowers after Cas has already gotten there is sort of useless, because the point is to make sure Cas knows Dean misses him when he’s not around.  That’s what Dean wants to drive home.  That he thinks about Cas when Cas isn’t there, that he’ll go out of his way for Cas.  That’s the point.

Dean wraps his arms around Cas's chest and holds him and thinks, I will keep him here tonight.  In the morning, I won't make him go.   Tomorrow, I won’t turn the tv on.  Tomorrow, I will talk to him.  Tomorrow, I’ll cook him anything he wants for dinner, even if it’s Chef Boyardee ravioli straight from the can.  Tomorrow, I’ll say nice things.  I won't wait any longer.  Tomorrow.  And tomorrow I will tell him. 

 

\---

He knows something’s wrong straightaway.  Cas is staring up at the ceiling.  The plaster is flaking off and falling to the floor.  “They’re here,” he says.  "They've come for me."

“Now?” Dean asks.  He doesn’t know why he says that, really. Of course it’s now.  It's tomorrow, and he's too late.

"I'm sorry, Dean," Cas says, and Dean takes his face in his hands and says the stupidest things, things like _I've been waiting and waiting, I've been waiting for you and I'm so sorry, please stay._

“I’ll come back,” Cas says.  “If I can,"  and he takes Dean’s face in his hands and brings it close to his own and he closes his eyes and smiles, but he says, "I don't want to go" and Dean says, "I don't want you to go either."

“I know,” Cas says, and all Dean can think about is how he’s so close, so close.  He's in love and he shouldn't have to wait.  So close to getting a happy ending, and maybe that’s it, Dean supposes, when you love someone, you don’t leave them to face the darkness alone.  Even if it hurts.  Maybe Cas won’t leave, if Dean can just love him with all his heart, so he says _I love you_  and _You know that, right?_ and _I'll wait for you, I'll wait for you, I'll wait, I'll be right here when you come back home, Cas.  I'll wait._

 


End file.
